BusyBox, dubbed by its developers “The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux,” is an open source and freely downloadable software project comprised of a wide range of command-line tools designed to help you interact better with a Linux kernel-based operating system, whether it is installed on a personal computer, laptop, mobile phone or embedded device.

Includes some of the most common Linux/UNIX tools

Some of the most common Linux/UNIX tools, that you’ve most probably used at least once in your life, are included in the BusyBox package, which is usually installed by default on any GNU/Linux or UNIX-like operating system. Among these, we can mention chmod, mount, umount, ps,

It contains all the important command-line utilities

To learn more about the importance of BusyBox into a GNU/Linux operating system, we can tell you that it includes all the mainstream and important command-line utilities that are either used by other command-line or graphical applications, or used directly by you, the user, for various tasks.

For example, it includes all the necessary archiving utilities, such as unzip for extracting zip files, tar for extracting tar archives, as well as bzip2, gzip, rpm, lzop, cpio, ar, bbunzip, dpkg, and rpm2cpio. It also includes many editors, tools for managing file systems, email utilities, find tools, Debian utilities, logging tools, printing tools, and numerous networking utilities.

Can be installed on any GNU/Linux operating system

It BusyBox is not already installed on your GNU/Linux box, you can easily install it by downloading the latest release from its website or via Softpedia, saving the archive on your Home directory, unpacking it using an archive manager tool, and opening a Terminal app.

In the Terminal emulator, go to the location where you’ve extracted the source package (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/busybox-1.23.1), run either of the ‘make oldconfig’. ‘make menuconfig’ or ‘make defconfig’ commands to configure BusyBox, then run the ‘make’ command to compile all tools. Install them system wide by running the ‘sudo make install’ command after a successful compilation.

BusyBox was reviewed by Marius Nestor, last updated on March 23rd, 2015